New Tickborne Disease WORSE THEN LYME! In NEW YORK- 100,000 New Yorkers INFECTED

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A new disease spread by deer ticks has already infected 100,000 New Yorkers since the state first started keeping track.

As CBS 2’s Dr. Max Gomez reported, the new deer tick-borne illness resembles Lyme disease, but is a different malady altogether – and it could be even worse.

The common deer tick is capable of spreading dangerous germs into the human bloodstream with its bite. However, Lyme disease is one of many diseases that ticks carry.

The latest disease is related to Lyme, and an infected person will suffer similar symptoms.

“Patients with this illness will develop, perhaps, fever, headache, flu-like symptoms, muscle pains — so they’ll have typical Lyme-like flu symptoms in the spring, summer, early fall,” said Dr. Brian Fallon of Columbia University. “But most of them will not develop the typical rash that you see with Lyme disease.”

A very good article at link. Worrisome for sure if you live in New England.

From the article:

Lyme disease is the most commonly reported tick-borne illness in the United States, and the incidence is growing rapidly. In 2009, the C.D.C. reported thirty-eight thousand cases, three times more than in 1991. Most researchers agree that the true number of infections is five to ten times higher. Although some of that increase is due to heightened awareness, transmission is rising in areas, like New England, where the disease is well established, and is spreading to regions as far south as Florida, through changes in climate and the movements of infected animals.

The disease is caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi. In the Northeast and the Midwest, B. burgdorferi is transmitted by the bite of a black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis. (In the Western United States, a related tick, Ixodes pacificus, prevails, and in Europe the main vector is Ixodes ricinus.) Lyme was all but unknown until 1977, when Allen Steere, a rheumatologist at Yale, produced the first definitive account of the infection. The condition was initially thought to have been an outbreak of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in and around Lyme, Connecticut. In 1982, Willy Burgdorfer, a medical entomologist at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories, determined that the infection was caused by the previously unknown spirochete borrelia. As is common in scientific practice, the bacterium was named for him: Borrelia burgdorferi.